The Fires Read online

  He looked confused, and I realized he was shorter than I was, and when he spoke, his lips turned inward. “Aren’t you going to invite me?” He seemed even easier to fool now, standing out here on the timid sidewalk, but I wasn’t in the mood anymore.

  I hadn’t seen Mr. Shultz in a long while. He taught math at Grace Lutheran school and used to go bowling with my father on Fridays. He was quiet as my father had been, with a habit of tugging on his earlobe when he talked, and he walked with a slouched shoulder, as if he were hiding something among the pens in his shirt pocket. Because Mr. Schultz had developed an appreciation for music in Cleveland, where he’d grown up, he loved the Bach my father played, and he came by the house often, saying, “I’ve got a problem for you, Louis,” and my father would give him advice.

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  Once the two of them were in the living room, drinking beers.

  I was walking past the doorway to get a glass of water in the kitchen, and I heard Mr. Schultz mention his wife’s name, Dorothy, a couple of times in this steady, subdued voice, but I didn’t hear what he was saying about her.

  As I was filling up my glass at the sink, I heard my father scream, “You what?” and almost dropped my glass. “You can’t let that go on, William.” My father’s anger was always so sudden and strange, it seemed not to belong to him.

  There was more talk, a mutter through the walls, and I was afraid now to go back to the book in my room, which would mean walking past the door near where they sat. I stood there in the kitchen, frozen, and heard my father’s voice again, blunt and hard as a brick. “I wish to God you had never told me.” And I wasn’t sure, but thought I heard Mr. Schultz weeping.

  My father had a happy, distracted way about him most of the time, a half smile on his lips, a busyness in his eyes, and this made his rage all the more frightening. It seemed to come from nowhere, like the twisters that picked at Porter in the fall and spring, and my mother and I never knew what to do, how to salvage the furniture he’d broken, how to calm him. She blamed his temper on the deaths of his parents in a car accident when he was a boy and the orphanage where he’d been sent to share a room with seven others, and said that after all he’d been through, we were lucky it happened only once in a while. But it felt strange to see Mr. Schultz have to endure my father’s temper.

  I didn’t want them to glance up and see me walking past the doorway, furtive, letting my long hair fall over my ears, the glass of water trembly in my hand.

  Sometimes my mother tried to goad him out of it. “Calm down, Louis. There’s no need to make a fuss. Maybe we’ll even laugh about this tomorrow.”

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  Quietly, I went out the back door in the kitchen and sat in the backyard tire swing, until I heard Mr. Schultz leave through the front door and the hoarse start of his car.

  Later, I learned from Jo, whose father was a good source of gossip, that Mr. Schultz had ended an affair with the school secretary and she’d been following him around town in her car, drunk, and had passed out more than once in the front seat of her yellow Buick.

  IV

  W hen I let myself into my mother’s house, I went to the kitchen. The sunlight, ruffled by the curtains, fidgeted on the walls and glanced off all the bright surfaces. I put the food I’d brought on the table and bent down to trace my thumb over the black heel marks in the yellow linoleum that curved and met to form a perfect wing. This was where she’d collapsed the day before and broken her ankle.

  The stairs were steep and the wood worn blond in the middle, as if some milky liquid were running down them. I dragged my hand along the banister as I went up. There were photographs of me on the wall: one of me in a smocked white dress before the fire, my arms strangely unscarred and pale, one of me two years later in a green long-sleeved dress and a closed-mouth smile, and other tentative school pictures with a curtain-sky background, school-bright colors. In each of them I look as if I’m waiting inside the rectangular borders of the frame—calm, prepared, expectant—but waiting for what?

  The bedroom door was halfway open, a crescent of light on the floor. I knocked lightly before nudging it open and going inside.

  The bedspread and linens were so smooth and sculpted, they had the look of stone. “Ella.” My mother sat up quickly when 53

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  she saw me and brushed back her loose hair. She was never as adorned as my grandmother, but now she looked pale and drawn, and the shadows beneath her eyes had darkened in a way that made me feel sorry for both of us.

  “Thank you, I love daisies,” she said, taking them from me.

  I looked at the lump of her ankle under the covers. “Does it hurt?”

  “No, sit down,” she said. The mattress creaked when I sat down near her feet.

  “I was just reaching for the flour on the top shelf when I fell,”

  she said.

  “I brought you some lunch,” I said, getting up. I watched myself keep my voice light and casual, my smile steady, but her lie made me angry. The doctor had told me she’d fainted from hunger.

  “I’ll go get it.”

  She pulled me back down to the bed. “I’ll eat later. I can get around, you know.” It was her plucky voice that she used to cover up sadness. “Sit down and tell me what you’ve been doing with yourself.”

  Tell her, I thought to myself. Get her to eat. “I want to find Hanna,” I said. She let go of my hand and slowly stroked the brownish lids of her eyes.

  “Now, why do you want to do that?” She looked around the room as if it were dark and she didn’t know where I was. She hadn’t always been this vague. She had sometimes fought back at him. Whoever you’re angry with, tell them, but don’t scream at us.

  I remembered how her mouth quivered and she punched lightly at her stomach, how my father went into the living room and practiced furiously for hours.

  I said, “Grandpa died. She should know.”

  She shook her head. “If we knew where she was, we would have called her.”

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  “You don’t have any idea?”

  She shook her head but wouldn’t look at me. She used to go to lectures at the college and for a while talked of going back to school, but after my father died she gave all that up. I think she felt she wasn’t capable of it anymore, and her voice got hoarser and less distinct. It was sometimes just a murmur. Her main activity was worrying, but my grandfather had come over once a week for dinner, and she’d asked him about small things, weather, the holidays, food, gardens, and that had seemed to soothe her.

  “Mr. Schultz said he saw you the other day.” She pursed her lips. “If your father were here, he’d know what to say. I know you always listened to him more than you have to me.”

  “That’s not true.” I stared down at my hands, thinking about how to weave our talk into something easy and trivial like wallpaper or shoes. I tried not to think about what Mr. Schultz might have told her. She pulled the blanket up over her arms, so it made a tent over her body. “You’re a teacher, you know, not a hotel clerk.”

  “I won’t be there forever.” I looked away and saw that one of her pill bottles was overturned on the dresser. She shifted her weight in bed. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her wince, but she hastily composed her face again. Her worry was fierce and persistent. Sometimes I thought I could hear it humming like a boiler. I searched her face, but I couldn’t tell how much she knew.

  A flannel nightgown thrown across the back of the bedstead slipped to the floor.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “Your father wasn’t a big talker, but he always knew the right thing to say.” She was shaking. “I never learned that.”

  I got up from the bed, went over to the dresser, and righted the overturned bottle of aspirin. Say it, I told myself, a wing batting at my throat. I turned, looked at her small, pert mouth. “Dr.

  Finch

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  says you’re not eating.” My father woul
d have taken her to the doctor long ago. Even my grandfather, who was sometimes too distracted to notice a person’s appearance, would never have let her do this; he would have said fasting was something for movie stars and foreigners—it disrupted the natural cycle of things.

  She shrugged and looked out the window, half her face clear in the sunlight, half of it in shadows. She wrapped herself in a cape of silence.

  “What’s happened to your appetite?” I asked, sitting down on the bed again.

  She kept looking away out the window, blinking rapidly. I looked out the window, too, following her gaze into the field. I watched the wind comb through the corn leaves, a tractor inching in the distance, snaillike. I could hear her breathing. It had always been this way—she glowed with the pain she wouldn’t admit to, her power over me all the more radiant; in fact, it was brightest when she seemed on the edge of collapse.

  A few minutes later, I felt my hands turn numb beneath me and realized I’d shoved them under my legs, but I was afraid to stir. I wondered if I would ever be able to leave her. We were trapped in these poses for a long time, awkward and frozen like the glass swans joined at the neck on the curio shelf.

  T here was a spitting, lonely rain the morning I went to Marietta’s. Knocking on the door, I caught a glimpse between the living-room curtains of her regal silhouette. I waited. I thought she must not have heard, so I knocked again. She didn’t answer.

  Rain pricked my face. I put my ear to the door and heard a sound like a spoon stirring. A lock of damp hair fell into my eyes. I kicked at the base of the door until my toes ached.

  Finally she answered. Her hair was curled, her face made up, THE FIRES / 57

  but her eyes looked strangely large and glassy. “Ella, honey, come in,” she said, opening the door. “You want coffee?” She headed for the kitchen.

  I followed her and sat down at the table still damp from being wiped. She took the cups and saucers from the cabinet. “My mother’s not eating, Grandma. She fainted. That’s how she broke her ankle.”

  “I knew it,” she said, calmly pouring cream from a carton into a pitcher. “She’s upset, but she just has to eat. Maybe now she’s learned her lesson.” The coffee began to perk in the big silver pot.

  “I’ll bring her a casserole, something you just have to warm up in the oven. That will make it easier for her.”

  After my father died, Marietta’s thick casseroles accumulated in our refrigerator, plastic tubs and foil-covered plates of heavy, gelatinous food that my mother couldn’t keep down and reminded me of tumors. Marietta must have noticed we hardly ate any of it but just didn’t know what else to do. We finally threw the casseroles away each day, so that we could give her back a clean container.

  She seemed distracted by something outside. “All those times we were down to our last cent, eating beans, there was money in that bank. Never a word about it.” She’d just had the lawyer take my grandfather’s will out of the bank deposit box, and I knew she was angry not because he’d kept the money a secret from her but because it was only one of many, and he’d died keeping most of them. If people found out how he’d died, some of them would unkindly say she’d driven him to it, but what looked like snob-bishness in Marietta was really a shyness, born out of her inability as a girl to talk past her own beauty, and he’d tunneled into those dark silences long before he married her.

  “And there was that one time the doctor thought my heart should be tested. Henry said we couldn’t afford it and the 58 / RENÉ STEINKE

  doctor didn’t know what he was doing.” Since I could remember, there had been a lot of worried talk about Marietta’s heart, though the fear seemed disproportionate to its mysterious defect. Did she have a hole in her heart like the one Cornell claimed Hanna had?

  When the coffee was ready and she poured it into our china cups with hummingbirds painted on the sides, I said, “Well, I’m going to look for Hanna. You don’t know where she is, I know, but you must have ideas.” Her name swung in the air between us.

  Marietta’s lower lip trembled. “Oh, no, honey. I wish I knew.”

  She shook her head daintily. Hanna was suddenly a far-off song, some barely remembered tune about making a fortune, sailing away to an island.

  “What about the police? Won’t they look for someone who just disappears?”

  Her thinly plucked eyebrows creased. “You think I haven’t asked them?” She hung her head and retreated, embarrassed, then pounded her fist on the table. “She’s a grown-up, and if she doesn’t want to be found, she can’t be found.” Her gaze trailed toward the window again, and she jumped up. “Don’t do it,” she hissed. “That crow again, eating my birdseed.” She grabbed the broom and rushed out the back door. Through the window I watched her scurry around the feeder, swatting at the crow as it skittered up into a tree.

  I looked down at my forearms. The skin was thick and resilient, but I wanted to be thin-skinned at that moment, to be bruised by my grandmother’s loss. When had she given up? When had Hanna’s absence become a thing she fought less than her crows?

  She walked in past me to put the broom back in the pantry. I asked her where Hanna had lived the last time she wrote. “She must have left a forwarding address.”

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  “Oh, that was such a long time ago when we were writing letters. That wouldn’t be any help.” A thin wire of grief trembled in her voice. “I just don’t want to see you waste your time. She’ll come back when she’s ready. We can’t force her.”

  “We won’t have to force her,” I said. “Her father died.”

  She looked away again. “Ella, you don’t really know her. You think you do, but you don’t. Decide what you’re going to do with the money your grandfather left you. That’s something.”

  T hose flames passed before I could hold them, make them lie down and stroke their grain. They slid through my fingers and trilled into the ceiling. When I caught them in my fist, they evaporated. I wanted to press them into balls I would save in a tin box and take out to roll in my palm and study their color, cut one open to see the roiling interior like an intestine or a heart.

  F ranco’s was a dark pizza parlor with sparkly dioramas lit up in its corners. Jo and I sat in the wooden booth next to the stuffed sheep that stared through the glass at us, its one leg lifted apologetically from the green carpet and silk flowers strewn among its hooves.

  When the pizza came, I slid a slice from the pan and nipped a string of cheese between my fingers.

  “I had a fight with David.” Jo slipped a disc of pepperoni in her mouth and chewed.

  “About what?” I didn’t know him well, since as a couple, they preferred to be alone. He was the kind of boyfriend who bought her yellow sweaters because the color suited her, and if he thought she looked weak, took her immediately to Pete’s and watched her eat a hamburger.

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  “He wouldn’t ask his boss for a raise, and we’ve been talking about it for weeks. He just lost his nerve.”

  I nodded, not knowing what to say. She was only twenty-three and engaged, and though plenty of girls got married at that age, I didn’t think Jo should. When she talked about it, her face cramped and she held this weak, trembly smile.

  Through the glass, the sheep in the diorama stared at us with its curious face. While we were eating and drinking red wine, she told me about the fight, how he’d slammed the car door in her face and then come back, sorry, how he’d kept burping because he’d drunk so much beer, and that she noticed he’d begun to wobble his chin like a puppet and that was a habit of his father’s she was most afraid he’d inherit.

  Jo shook her head slightly and gulped at her wine. “Sometimes I wonder if I want to marry him just to get out of the house.”

  Though her dad drank so much he sometimes couldn’t go to work, she usually liked to tell me how smart he was, if he only had more self-confidence, or about the gifts for her he bought through the mail and couldn’t afford—a pearl pendant and
Italian leather boots. They took care of one another, in their way, and this was the first time I’d heard her talk about him as a burden.

  “Do you?” I said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe you should get a place on your own first. David’s got his job at the Vidette—he’s not going anywhere.”

  Her eyes teared up. “I couldn’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t have the money.”

  “How much do you give him?”

  “About half.” Ever since she’d taken up bookkeeping at the Linden Hotel, I’d suspected she’d been supporting her dad, who seemed to work less and less.

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  “When did that start?”

  “I don’t know. It just happened gradually.”

  She looked radiant in the red light of the candle, with her pale skin and dark lashes. “David thinks he’ll be better off on his own after the wedding. Because he’ll just have to be.”

  She sat upright, and her neck seemed to lengthen, and I could see behind her eyes, how she was putting things in order, even if it meant squeezing wishes that didn’t exactly fit into boxes of plans where they belonged.

  “It’s not the only way,” I said. “What about your viola?”

  She shook her head and made a dismissive tsking sound.

  “Haven’t even practiced in months. I don’t have the discipline for it anymore.”

  “Maybe if you tried harder…” I said.

  “Will you shut up? I’m not going to college, okay?” She turned her head toward the black-and-white photograph on the wall of a Porter basketball team from twenty or thirty years before. “What good did it do you?”

  The muscles in my face tensed. If I pretended this didn’t hurt, it almost didn’t. “I haven’t finished yet,” I stammered.

  She nodded, still not looking at me. “Look, you go off if you want to. I like it here.”

  It sometimes seemed the one thing about herself Jo was sure of—she was born and raised in Porter, Indiana, home of Umlacher’s popcorn factory and a five-time state championship basketball team. If I at least knew where I belonged, like her, it would be less frightening at those times when I didn’t know who I was.